By Taro Ichikawa
HIROSHIMA | 31 July 2024 (IDN) — Nearly one month ahead of the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings—by the United States—of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, representatives from 11 of the world’s major religions joined academic experts and tech leaders for an AI Ethics for Peace historic conference in Hiroshima on July 9 and 10. Collectively, these religious leaders represent billions of faithful around the world.
Pope Francis called on representatives from the world’s religions to unite behind the defense of human dignity in an age that will be defined by artificial intelligence. “I ask you to show the world that we are united in asking for a proactive commitment to protect human dignity in this new era of machines,” the pope wrote in a message to the conference.
Religious leaders represented Eastern faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Bahá’í, among others, as well as leaders of the three Abrahamic religions. They also signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics—a document developed by the Pontifical Academy for Life which asks signatories to promote an ethical approach to AI development.
Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the innovation ministry of the Italian government have signed the document. A July 10 press release from the academy said Franciscan Father Paolo Benanti, an ethics professor at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, presented an addendum to the document in Hiroshima specifically focused on the ethical governance of generative AI—which can process, interpret and produce human language. The addendum said generative AI requires sustained commitment to ensuring its use for humanity’s good.
In his message to the conference, published by the Vatican on July 10, Pope Francis noted the “great symbolic importance” of the religious leaders’ meeting in Hiroshima and noted the increasingly central role which artificially intelligent technology plays in society.
“As we look at the complexity of the issues before us, recognizing the contribution of the cultural riches of peoples and religions in the regulation of artificial intelligence is key to the success of your commitment to the wise management of technological innovation,” he wrote.
Echoing his address on artificial intelligence to the G7 summit in June, the pope asked the participants to jointly push for the ban of lethal autonomous weapons, which “starts from an effective and concrete commitment to introduce ever greater and proper human control.”
“No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being,” he wrote.
Opening the conference July 9, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, academy president, said that artificial intelligence “must be guided so that its potential serves the good from the moment of its design.”
“At Hiroshima, a place of the highest symbolic value, we strongly invoke peace, and we ask that technology be a driver of peace and reconciliation among peoples,” he said. “We stand here, together, to say loudly that standing together and acting together is the only possible solution.”
At the Hiroshima conference, the Rome Call gained 16 new signatories, and Father Paolo Benanti introduced a new addendum that focuses on the governance of generative AI.
85 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious tradition
The Pew Research Center reports that 85 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious tradition. Leaders representing all major religions have signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics. This makes the Rome Call platform representative of most people on the planet.
On the second day of the event, the organizing partners (Pontifical Academy for Life, Religions for Peace Japan, Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace of the United Arab Emirates, Commission for Interreligious Relations of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel) presented a document named Hiroshima Appeal, in which, in addition to reiterating the need to use AI only for the good of humanity and the planet, they urged the international community to use peaceful ways to resolve any conflict in order to achieve an immediate cessation of all armed conflicts.
Hiroshima served as an especially poignant setting for a reflection on AI ethics for peace. Seventy-nine years ago this August, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first and last places atomic weapons were used as weapons of war, causing unfathomable devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
As Microsoft President Brad Smith highlighted in his remarks at the conference, every technology can be used as both a tool and a weapon. While the atom was harnessed as a weapon before it became a tool, AI is the opposite: created as a tool, AI must be protected and regulated so that it doesn’t become a weapon.
Three fundamental goals of the Rome Call
At the Hiroshima conference, Microsoft President Brad Smith laid out what he sees as three fundamental goals of the Rome Call, goals that also drive Microsoft’s responsible AI work.
1) Ensuring that we bring the benefits of AI to everyone. Thomas Edison invented electricity in 1879 for a relatively narrow purpose: powering a light bulb. In the next twenty years, this invention spurred a flurry of innovation that created a wide range of technologies we rely on today, from the electric oven to the electric fan. Yet more than 150 years later, nearly 700 million people still don’t have access to electricity. We can and must do better when it comes to AI.
2) Focusing on what can go wrong. To advance AI responsibly, we need to think not just about what might go right with AI, but also what might go wrong. Tech companies, civil society, and governments need to spend time thinking about and guarding against ways in which malicious actors might misuse AI technology. AI has already been weaponized by those who want to mislead voters and by bad actors who want to defraud people of their money or make life more difficult for women through abusive synthetic content like non-consensual intimate imagery. At Microsoft, we’re working with leaders from the world’s major religions to anticipate and solve these problems.
3) Preserving the planet by prioritizing sustainability. Pursuing AI technology is a resource-heavy endeavor. While Microsoft is working to advance the sustainability of AI by optimizing datacenter energy and water efficiency, advancing low-carbon materials, and improving the efficiency of AI and cloud services, the climate crisis represents an urgent and existential threat that AI can also help us address. AI is already being used to forecast degradation of solar panels, track whale migration for conservation purposes, and map the melting of glacial lakes. If we want to slow the pace of human-caused climate change, we must accelerate these and other efforts. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Photo: Participants of the Rome Call for AI ethics with the Memorial Cenotaph at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Credit: Wikimedia Commons-.
